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Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

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Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#111

Post by jpatokal »

quentindemetz wrote: post #102
macrael wrote: post #4

Google using captchas to get humans to read street addresses captured by street view cars to improve maps results remains one of the most Googly things they've ever done. Genius, lateral, and a little weird.

Google didn't invent this: Luis von Ahn, a CMU grad student did in 2000. Google acquired it in 2009. https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/success-stories/recaptcha...

The original pre-Google reCAPTCHA was used for digitizing books. Using it to read house numbers for Street View was a Google addition.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#112

Post by dsp1234 »

quentindemetz wrote: post #102
macrael wrote: post #4

Google using captchas to get humans to read street addresses captured by street view cars to improve maps results remains one of the most Googly things they've ever done. Genius, lateral, and a little weird.

Google didn't invent this: Luis von Ahn, a CMU grad student did in 2000. Google acquired it in 2009. https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/success-stories/recaptcha...

The above poster doesn't say that Google invented recaptcha, only that their use of it to have humans clean street view data is very Googly.

The original recaptcha was only text from book digitization projects.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#113

Post by garganzol »

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit provided similar functionality since 2007. The corresponding component is called NoBot. http://www.ajaxcontroltoolkit.com/NoBot/NoBot.aspx

"NoBot is a control that attempts to provide CAPTCHA-like bot/spam prevention without requiring any user interaction. This approach is easier to bypass than an implementation that requires actual human intervention, but NoBot has the benefit of being completely invisible."

Works like a charm even now, 10 years later.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#114

Post by return0 »

malikNF wrote: post #5

While I like the idea of not having to deal with these annoying ReCAPTCHA prompts, something somehow feels "intrusive ?". I mean does this mean google is going to keep track of what I would be doing when I visit a site? Say for instance I am signing up for a website, does the password I enter get sent to google servers to be analyzed now?

I expect to see more people putting recaptchas in their login screens, which means even more data funneled to google (after NSA i guess).

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#115

Post by mattbgates »

delta1 wrote: post #109
mattbgates wrote: post #107

I started making my own as Google Recaptcha was getting annoying. At its most basic, hide a field. On your PHP page that does the checking, simply see if that field has anything in it. If it does, its a bot. If it doesn't, it's not a bot.

Do you use inline styles to hide the field or "obfuscate" it through a CSS class?

It just doesn't show up at all. Placed right before the form ends. I also use a combination of PHP and Javascript to create my own captcha. PHP generates a random string which I send to Javascript to hold. Upon clicking a button, if what is in the captcha does not match what is in the Javascript, thou shalt not pass. Haven't had any bot break through it yet, but I did have a Russian hacker email me, pissed off (entire email was in Russian, but I'm pretty sure the translator did well to know he wasn't happy), because he had created a bot specifically for my website that managed to create over 2000 posts in less than an hour.

You can view the captcha at https://mypost.io/ .. you cannot create a post without entering the captcha. I ended up creating my own because despite entering the correct answer (selecting the right images), Google Recaptcha would not recognize it.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#116

Post by provemewrong »

zumu wrote: post #42

I always wondered how blind people entered captchas. Does this finally make captchas accessible?

Speaking of. Audio captchas are one of the most spooky things I've heard. Noise in the background and muddled voice listing numbers. Think numbers stations, except they try their best to make the numbers unintelligible (just like regular captchas tend to do with written words).

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#117

Post by reaktivo »

gregschlom wrote: post #38
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "the jitter test"?

I would guess testing that the mouse pointer moves semi-randomly over the button, in a fashion typical of the way humans browse a web page

I can't image it being limited to jitter, I'm curious how they handle touchscreens.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#118

Post by m_t »

arjie wrote: post #104
Freak_NL wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an ethical distinction for some. I am completely fine with a type of captcha that helps improve some public domain or free/libre licensed resource (e.g., proofreading words scanned from public domain works). I am not okay with helping some megacorporation sanitize their proprietary database or training their machine learning neural networks for free. As mentioned elsewhere in this topic; I'd much rather spend so…

But what if it's a generic captcha. It doesn't improve anything. Are you okay with that?

A generic captcha doesn't use the work done by the user. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think I can guess what could be their answer.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#119

Post by annnnd »

danso wrote: post #94
mrighele wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to do free work for Google is more than weird for me. For this reason unless the page is really important I end up closing the tab. If it was for open service (such as OpenStreetMap) it would be a different matter though.

How is that "free work"? Automated usage can threaten a site's bottom-line, and even its existence. A site resorts to Google's CAPTCHA's service because they don't have the money to build their own detector. It's not a service that was free for Google to create. edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the p…

GP is talking about visitors doing free work for Google. Googel can use the results to train its algorithms - this is a big set of data and very valuable.

Of course the site (and with it visitors) benefit in this exchange, so I agree with you that it is not entirely "free".

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#120

Post by dsp1234 »

danso wrote: post #94
mrighele wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to do free work for Google is more than weird for me. For this reason unless the page is really important I end up closing the tab. If it was for open service (such as OpenStreetMap) it would be a different matter though.

How is that "free work"? Automated usage can threaten a site's bottom-line, and even its existence. A site resorts to Google's CAPTCHA's service because they don't have the money to build their own detector. It's not a service that was free for Google to create. edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the p…

How is that "free work"?

The original recaptcha was used to help clear up text from book digitization projects where OCR couldn't understand the data. The appeal of this was that these works were in the public domain, and thus proper digitization of these works is a societal-wide benefit.

Since Google purchased it, they've been using it to:

1.) Clean street view data for a proprietary product (Google maps)

2.) Build training sets for unknown ML purposes

These are activities that Google could very much pay a group of people to do. Instead, through recaptcha, they are getting that work from the end user for no payment. A case could be made that it's not free for the owner of the site that deploy recaptcha (because they get value out of the service, and Google gets data/ML services). However, the actual end user who has to fill out the recaptcha does not benefit in any significant way. Since a recaptcha is an inconvenience to the end user, that user pays both with the time to fill it out, and the data gathered by Google.

TL;DR Some people do not like that Google benefits from a transaction where Google is not a party, and where otherwise, Google could generate the benefit using their own resources.

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